


Detente

by entanglednow



Category: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-23
Updated: 2008-07-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:15:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm your nemesis, you're not supposed to be having sex dreams about me, what would your psychiatrist say?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Detente

  
Having a head injury wasn't fun. Having a head injury was like being in some horrible pain machine made of nails and screws and other wood type instruments of a hard and sharp nature. Captain Hammer didn't quite know where he was, he was laying on something cold, and flat and there was a lot of jangly stuff hanging around, and everything kept swimming in and out, like it was underwater.

Or like _he_ was underwater. His head was in horrible pain. He didn't really need it for the hammering. But it was important in its own way, and having it hurt this much was a horrible, horrible betrayal. Superheroes were not supposed to feel _actual_ pain. Angsty emotional pain yes, physical pain, not so much.

Captain Hammer had had some long conversations, with the helpful man who lived in an office, about pain. When he was eventually convinced to come out of the cupboard, and stop crying. Captain Hammer could deal with pain. He wouldn't be surprised again into letting his nemesis escape because of a little, a lot, an excruciating amount of - Oh my god this _HURT!_

He laid on the strangely comfortable flat surface and whimpered for a little while. After a long stretch of time, in which the pain didn't improve, he closed his eyes, because it was easier like that.

It was also darker.

Curious.

Then his head didn't hurt quite so much any more. He moved his head.

Ow, ow, ow. He moved it back again - only to encounter round black goggles and underneath them the fine curve of an amused mouth.

"Dr. Horrible!" Captain Hammer thought he overdid the righteousness on that, because his head started hurting again. He thought about getting up, and hitting him in some sort of heroic way. He tried at least. Until his head said very firmly ' _don't do that you'll throw up_.' It helped if he closed one eye.

His remaining open eye told him he was now in a shiny, complicated room full of machinery, and wires, and things. He was laying on...a medical table, by the look of it. Being loomed over by Dr. Horrible. Dr. Horrible shouldn't be allowed to loom over him, he should be the one looming. He was the loomer. He owned the loomination- no, he'd gone too far there.

"Where have you brought me?"

"I haven't bought you anywhere. You're dreaming." Dr. Horrible lifted one of his own gloved hands and looked at it. Then he looked down at himself. "I don't think I'm this tall in real life, nor this menacing - I really am quite menacing in your fevered, dream hallucination aren't I. I'd probably be flattered if I knew."

Captain Hammer opened the other eye, which was...almost bearable again. He didn't think you were allowed to be in pain while you were dreaming, it seemed grossly unfair. Dreaming was not for pain, dreaming was for giant, talking French fries, and naked dancing girls, and fighting giant snails from Jupiter, that were eating the population of earth...he'd quite enjoyed that one.

"So if I'm dreaming, where am I?"

Dr. Horrible shrugged.

"You probably passed out wherever I left you. You're probably, as we speak, bleeding into your brain. Invulnerability's no good when you're bleeding into your brain." Dr. Horrible sucked air through his teeth, and shook his head. "That would be a very undignified end for a superhero wouldn't it?"

Captain Hammer lifted a hand and pressed it, very carefully, against his forehead. His glove came away dry, which he was very grateful about, because he'd had horrible mental images of some hideous open head wound, pouring blood all over his own face. Captain Hammer hadn't seen his own blood since he was six.

And oh, there came that weird, sweaty, cold, unpleasant feeling again.

"Would you like a paper bag?" Dr. Horrible asked, and Captain Hammer knew sarcastic amusement when he saw it.

"No, I do not want a paper bag. Superheroes don't need paper bags."

And now he couldn't shake the idea of his brain bleeding away to itself without anyone knowing.

"Perhaps you should tell someone I'm here."

Dr. Horrible pushed his goggles up into his hair and peered down at him. "And how exactly am I going to do that? Do you get cell phone reception inside your head? Any psy-powered superhero friends Hmm?"

Dr. Horrible raised an eyebrow.

"Any superhero friends at all?"

There was a pointed silence and Dr. Horrible shook his head knowingly.

"I didn't think so. The superhero crowd won't let you hang around with them, will they? Something to do with your narcissism, and your need to project an inflated sense of your own importance into every socio-economic issue."

"How do you know all that? You're supposed to be my brain and I didn't understand half of that."

"You _know_ that I'm smarter than you." One of Dr. Horrible's eyebrows lifted. "You know that I know things you don't. Even your ludicrously overblown ego isn't that out of touch with reality."

"What are you doing here anyway?"

"I don't know, I came out of your fragmented, whining, emotionally stunted imagination."

"Hey!" Captain Hammer protested, because a man knew when he was being insulted, damn it!

"It certainly wouldn't be the first time I turned up in one of your dreams," Dr. Horrible said pointedly. "Or the second, or the third, or the fifth or the twelfth...."

"A superhero needs to ponder the ways of evil so he can defeat it."

"What did you learn from the one where I turned up in just the boots and goggles?"

Captain Hammer opened his mouth, then shut it. He remembered that one. He lost his train of thought for a second. When he looked up again Dr. Horrible was still looking at him with that curious expression, only now his smile was just a _little_ wider.

"I wouldn't expect you to understand how the superhero mind works."

"Oh I think I know how your mind works perfectly well, Captain Hammer. And I really hope I never get it into my head to build some sort of dream-reading device. I might scandalise myself."

Dr. Horrible drummed his fingers on the table. Then seemed to make a decision. The table shuddered under the weight of a hand, and then a knee, and Captain Hammer was no longer alone on the table which, for some bizarre reason, he still couldn't seem to get up off of.

Dr. Horrible swung a leg all the way over him, and sat down. A narrow thump of weight across Captain Hammer's thighs, all insolent invasion of space and fiendish smile.

"Captain Hammer is not a couch for supervillains," Captain Hammer said crossly.

"Stop talking about yourself in third person. You're not a National Monument."

"I'll have you know I am a National Monument. Or if I'm not then -"

"Don't say your penis should be, or I will do horrible and painful things to you, until I feel like stopping."

Captain Hammer wondered if he could get away with thinking it? Dr. Horrible glared at him. Probably not. Dr. Horrible was quite a lot scarier when he wasn't real.

"You really are in an excellent position for terrible and nefarious experimentation."

"You can try Dr. Horrible."

"Don't tempt me, even your brain can get quite creative when it comes to terrible and unpleasant experimentation."

"My brain wouldn't hurt me!"

" _Mine_ would, I think that's all that matters."

"But you're me, aren't you? Or are you ' _you_ ' now?" Captain Hammer was confused.

Dr. Horrible snatched one of his hands up from the table, then with an expression that was balanced somewhere between curiousity and fiendish intent he pulled his glove off.

"Hey!"

"They _do_ come off, I was starting to wonder."

"They _don't_ come off!" Captain Hammer protested. "They're part of my costume. I'm Captain Hammer and I need manly fists inside large manly gloves."

Dr. Horrible turned his hand round and made a noise of discovery.

"What?"

"Nothing....you know I know the reason you started wearing them."

Captain Hammer pulled his hand out of Dr. Horrible's grip, though he didn't manage to catch his glove, which went sailing over Horrible's head. Which he clearly found hilarious.

"Who told you that! And also, it's not true." Captain Hammer pointed a finger at him, not the hand that now no longer had a glove. He was protecting that one.

"No one told me, I'm you."

Dr. Horrible stripped the other glove from his hand, leaving Captain Hammer feeling oddly naked. Then he caught his fingers before Captain Hammer could drag them out of snatching distance and considered his hand, like it was something interesting.

"Your hands aren't noticeably bigger than mine. You've just gotten so used to the gloves...."

Dr. Horrible settled his own hand against it, and Captain Hammer inhaled sharply. Dr. Horrible eyed him from underneath his goggles for a long complicated moment.

"You have a hand thing," he finally said carefully.

"I do not."

"You _do_ , you have a hand thing."

"I use my hands to smash the criminal underworld, because I am Captain Hammer, I don't have a- AAaaah."

Captain Hammer now had his hand inside the fold of Dr. Horrible's jacket, slipped under the material in one movement, and flattened on a smooth plane of skin. Skin that was invitingly warm under his bare fingers.

Dr. Horrible uncurled his own fingers from around Hammer's wrist, and let his hand drop.

There was a heartbeat thumping under the edge of Captain Hammer's thumb.

He tried to make a protesting noise but it came out as mostly air. He tried for a protesting face instead.

"I know you're lying," Dr. Horrible said quietly.

"I didn't say anything."

"I'm already inside your head you moron. Also -" There was a very pointed downwards gesture. "Hammer."

Captain Hammer would admit that he had him there. The Hammer was interested. More than interested, curiously hopeful. Captain Hammer thought he should probably protest though. This part had been in the manual.

"I was warned about evil supervillains trying to seduce heroes away from the straight and narrow."

"Funny." Dr. Horrible said through a smile, though Captain Hammer didn't see what was so amusing about it. "Oh, and I'm not seducing you, technically _you're_ seducing you, as me."

"I'm not."

"Yes you are."

Captain Hammer was half-way to an argument protesting that when Dr. Horrible shifted where he sat and -

Oh. Captain Hammer made a noise, hand moving to find somewhere more, something more - he couldn't get to Dr. Horrible's waist, but he could drag open the front of the coat, buttons popping under his enthusiasm. It didn't slide open very far, it slid open far enough though. Far enough for Captain Hammer to get a hand all the way in, to slide it down, and the skin twitched and rippled under his fingers.

He found the curve of a ribcage and used it to pull himself to a sit. He was apparently no longer stuck to the fiendish table.

Dr. Horrible swayed under the movement but didn't fall.

"So if you're me," Captain Hammer said with the aid of a pointy finger. "Is this technically masturbation?"

"How do you live inside your own head? There must be _so_ much space in there!"

Captain Hammer disapproved of a face that looked that smug. He wrapped his other hand round Dr. Horrible's throat in a way that, for a moment, felt just familiar enough.

Until Dr. Horrible tipped his head back, and lifted an eyebrow, and looked at him like he - like he - Captain Hammer suddenly no longer had enough blood to run his brain. Which made everything very difficult.

Dr. Horrible swallowed, and Captain Hammer felt every single second of it.

"I'm your nemesis, you're not supposed to be having sex dreams about me, what would your psychiatrist say?"

"My psychiatrist talks a lot about my giant ego, though I consider it a pretty fine amount of ego personally."

"Why am I not surprised."

"He'd probably say that I'm working on my issues. Apparently I have issues."

"Doesn't everyone, yours just come with bonus superpowers, which you don't _deserve_."

Dr. Horrible's fingers had found the bottom of his shirt without him realising it.

"You do realise your shirt isn't a costume, you realise you're wearing your own merchandising?"

Captain Hammer had a hilarious comeback for that, but Dr. Horrible was already sliding the shirt up his back, all warm fingers and sharp nails, and he forgot what his hilarious comeback was, and then he had to let go of Dr. Horrible's throat because his shirt was over his head, and then it wasn't. But there were fingers in his hair, pulling him up, and in, and Dr. Horrible had an evil, evil mouth. Captain Hammer investigated it, purely for research purposes, so he'd be immune to its evil influence next time.

And 'Oh' the hair pulling was quite interesting. He could get used to that.

He couldn't remember the superhero rules on letting the dream hallucination of your same sex evil nemesis seduce you. But on the plus side he was totally going to get to have sex. Probably awesome sex. Probably awesome, filthy, _evil_ sex.

He probably would have gotten lost in that thought if Dr. Horrible hadn't dug his teeth into the curve of his shoulder.

"Ow, I'm supposed to be invulnerable."

"We're in your head, I can hurt you if I want to." Captain Hammer was certain he wasn't supposed to be...making noise at the prospect. Because he'd only recently been introduced to the concept of pain, and he wasn't sure he wanted to be shaking its hand, and introducing it to his friends.

"You don't have any friends," Dr. Horrible murmured against his lower lip.

There were teeth marks, there were teeth marks in his skin, and that didn't happen, that didn't happen to his skin. His skin did not behave like that. It was still sort of stinging, like the teeth were still there, or like the skin remembered them. It was a different sort of pain to the _head injury_ pain or the _something blew up under me_ pain, or the _death ray exploded in my face_ pain.

It was a dirtier sort of pain.

The psychiatrist hadn't mentioned there was a dirty sort of pain.

He thought he kind of liked it.

He also liked it when Dr. Horrible did what he wanted, he could get used to that.  He wondered if he could convince him to let him do the throat thing again.

"This is just like you. Having sex dreams while your brain is dying, starving for oxygen on some street corner somewhere."

The coat was getting annoying but Captain Hammer found that the red material tore down the back really easily, one long rip that left Dr. Horrible's back a long curve of pale skin. The rest of it slid down his shoulders to disappear somewhere on the floor.

"About that, do you think you should call someone, I don't think I'll want to be dead later."

"Still not an actual person," Dr. Horrible provided against the curve of Captain Hammer's ear, and then bit it.

"Oh."

Captain Hammer decided that now would be the perfect time to take charge of his own dream. He caught a hand full of mad hair and convinced Dr. Horrible that his mouth was where things were currently happening. After a brief moment of negotiation, in which Dr. Horrible bit his lower lip and Captain Hammer was _enthusiastic_ with his tongue they came to some sort of agreement on the matter.

There was a squeak of rubber when their boots slid together and Captain Hammer went on a mission to find the waistband of those angry red pants. Clearly nudity was the goal here. Because nudity led to orgasms and orgasms were good, Captain Hammer deserved _lots_ of them. Captain Hammer liked working towards goals. He found something that tore under his enthusiasm and Dr. Horrible jerked under the movement; made a surprised and more than dirty noise in his ear.

He was smart though, he caught on fast, rising to his knees, chest sliding against the side of Captain Hammer's face in a way that was very distracting. And then something smacked into his hand a second before his belt was drawn all the way through its loops, only to fly across the room with a 'crash.' They did briefly, nearly fall off the table trying to get Captain Hammer's pants down, until he remembered that his superpowers worked on his own clothes as well.

There was a lot of material, but all of it hit the floor eventually, and Doctor Horrible had exactly the right amount of waist to wrap his hands round, and the slide of bare thighs on skin when he pulled him closer was definitely evil. Just the right amount of evil, not too much, and he definitely liked the hair pulling, and the enthusiasm.

Dr. Horrible had sharp teeth.

"I kind of like the dirty sort of pain," Captain Hammer supplied. In case that became important at some point.

Or now.

A second later he was staring at the ceiling again and he would have found that rude, but then he was experiencing two sensations. The drag of wet tongue and the slip-slide of cold metal and he couldn't for the life of him decide which he liked most. Both of them were currently travelling down his stomach in a smug and lazy fashion.

Captain Hammer looked down.

 _That_ , he liked _that._

He'd be quite happy watching _that_ for a very long time.

Also it shouldn't have been possible to grin while doing that.

He couldn't resist pushing both hands into Dr Horrible's hair, one finger sliding under the elastic strap and that was much more interesting. Though Dr. Horrible protested that seizure of control in a quick, wet and slightly obscene sort of way.

That - that definitely qualified as the dirty sort of pain. Captain Hammer experimented to see if he could make him do it again. There was a chuckle against the muscle of his stomach, breath warm against the skin, a brief, dirty ache away from what he really, really wanted.

Captain Hammer wondered exactly how easy it would be to get Dr. Horrible underneath him.

Then wondered why he was wondering....

Dr. Horrible didn't need much encouragement to slide back up and though Captain Hammer was briefly distracted by the sensation of skin dragging and pressing _everywhere_ , he did eventually get an arm round Dr Horrible's waist, and turned them on the slick, warm surface of the table.

Horrible looked much better there than he had, and he made a quiet mock protesting noise at Captain Hammer settling his weight. But there was something missing. Captain Hammer lifted a hand, found the cold rim of an eyepiece, and in a quick drag of elastic he drew the goggles down over Dr. Horrible's eyes. It got him a sharp dirty curl of laughter and a stretch of mouth that was wide and filthy and full of teeth.

The Hammer approved.

One of Dr. Horrible's legs slid over the curve of his hip, and wound round his waist, rubber dug a line down his back and over the curve of his ass. Captain Hammer found Horrible's wrists, slender underneath his fingers, and he dragged them both up, and pinned them to the metal of the table.

Yes, _this_ , this was _exactly_ what he wanted.

"Hammer?"

"Huh?"

"Wake up."

  
...

  
Oh.

The first thing Captain Hammer registered was that he wasn't actually naked. The second was that it was much brighter in real life than in his dream. Much brighter and the room full of exciting medical instruments and shiny machinery was gone.

And his head hurt again.

This place was grubby, and it smelled like cats. All in all he'd enjoyed being in the dream hallucination more. He turned his head. The real Dr. Horrible was a narrow, dusty red shape against the far wall. His goggles were wonky, and his hair was flat on one side. Captain Hammer suspected that he'd fallen asleep somewhere. There was still a smudge of building dust on his cheek, and a tear in the sleeve of his coat, which he was unconsciously picking at with his other hand.

He was also chewing the skin on the edge of his thumb, and even from here Captain Hammer could see the purple mark across the side of his jaw where he'd hit him with his own plasma gun. He looked a thousand times more real than the evil, dream hallucination of himself. He also smelled like cats and burnt plastic and he'd made the edge of his thumb bleed. He looked smaller, and thinner than Captain Hammer remembered.

"I'm not on a street corner somewhere."

Dr. Horrible frowned. "What? No, why should you be?"

"Evil dream hallucination you told me I was."

"Okay," Dr. Horrible said simply.

"Is this your evil lair?"

Dr. Horrible glanced around, and then looked at him again, one eyebrow raised.

"Yes, it's my evil lair, my evil lair has no windows, plastic for a floor, and smells like incontinent cats."

"That was sarcasm?"

"Yes it was."

Captain Hammer pulled himself to a sit. It was a long unpleasant process which ended with him slumped over on his own hands.

Dr. Horrible started to fidget before he felt ready to open his eyes again.

"I'm still recovering from my terrible head injury," he explained grudgingly.

"It wasn't a head injury," Dr. Horrible's eye twitched, though that might have had something to do with the graze next to it. "It's just a headache. I have some aspirin, if you want."

"Captain Hammer doesn't take aspirin," he protested, though he was fairly certain his voice came out sounding upset about that.

There was a quiet moment where Dr. Horrible just looked at him. It wasn't a smug look, or a filthy look. It was just a tired look. There was a sigh on the end of it. Then he tossed him the bottle.

"I don't know if it will work, with your weird biology. But half a building fell on you, and you didn't die."

Captain Hammer isn't entirely sure if he was supposed to take one or all of them. His head hurt _a lot._

"To be honest, if I'd gone my whole life without pain, it'd probably throw me too."

"I did not freak out."

"I never said you did."

There had been a nasty rumour going in one of the smaller newspapers. Captain Hammer suspected Dr. Horrible of starting it.

"So er, you're not dead so I'm going to -" Dr. Horrible waved a hand in the direction of the door.

Captain Hammer wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to say to that.

He was pretty sure he should be following him back to his _actual_ evil lair. Or at least confiscating the plasma gun, and hitting him a few times for good measure.

He really didn't feel like it though.

He thought that hitting him might be...weird for a while.

And not in a good way.

So when Dr. Horrible tromped off across the plastic, Captain Hammer laid back down on the strange flat wooden thing instead.

Aspirin tasted awful.


End file.
